Leeds Arts University Repository (CREST)
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446 research outputs found
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Mature students matter in art and design education
No full textThe creative practices of five people who had previously studied on an Access to HE course (art and design) in the United Kingdom were explored through narrative inquiry. All had participated in higher education after their Access to HE courses. After completing their studies, the participants set up various Visual Culture Learning Communities (VCLCs) in order to support people who did not have access to the arts through formal education. The participants’ stories were analysed in relation to various types of altruism (entrepreneurial, philanthropic, and selfless). It was found that the Access to HE learning experience stayed with some of the participants and encouraged them to open up learning spaces for others. Some of the ‘Access values’ relating to social justice, democratic education, student-centeredness and community engagement were modelled and developed by the participants. Their narratives suggested they were acting because of either entrepreneurial, philanthropic or selfless altruism. This challenged some of the neoliberal discourses around the individualistic motives of mature students that link access to higher education only to increased economic rewards and status
Twitch, shift, jerk, slip, repeat
No full textThis output is a series of digital GIFs Eyre made in response to a commission from Open Eye Gallery and University of Salford Art Collection. The programme of commissions is called ‘How We Remember’ and its aim was to identify gaps in the public consciousness around who is affected by the global health crisis, and create opportunities to document the lived experience of those who have found themselves especially vulnerable. Eyre chose to look at the way that women were impacted by the virus. Research has shown that statistically women are more likely to have suffered economically over the last year and many women have effectively been ‘re-traditionalised’ – confined to the domestic space of the home.
We are all navigating unfamiliar terrains, constantly re-drawing our boundaries as our physical presence and visibility in the world continually slips and changes. Many of us have found ourselves existing in an in-between place, somewhere between virtual and physical worlds, communicating through barriers, windows and screens and having to negotiate the unexpected materialities of this new space including the disruptive buffering, freezing and glitching of our virtual lives. There is a feeling of being on the cusp; of being suspended between different spaces and states, and the feeling of fragmentation as we sit at home looking out of the window whilst our digital doppelgängers play in virtual space. Eyre wanted to convey the feeling when you view the GIFs that their surfaces could slip at any moment. The repetition of the GIF, at first comforting, can quickly become uncomfortable. The analogies with our current situation don’t end there – GIFs are open, endlessly adaptable – and of course, they can go viral.
The research was shared via Open Eye Gallery’s website.
It was also shared via the University of Salford’s Art Collection website. The project was selected for Peer to Peer UK/HK digital festival
Our Plan is to Announce
No full textThe output is a text-based artwork by Crouch presented in the form of a website.
Research process: Crouch has remixed content from UK government coronavirus briefings, which were broadcast daily between 23 March and 23 June 2020. Ministers’ speeches from each day were appropriated and subjected to a reorganisation procedure, with the speech ‘remixes’ being based variously on particular grammatical word, sentence or speech attribute.
Research insights: The procedures explore what happens when informational content of the briefings is rigorously and systematically turned into nonsense. At times the outcome remixes foreground government priorities or rhetoric, highlighting dominant words or phrases. In other the materiality of language is prioritised. Here a loss of clear meaning hints towards a sense of despondency and lack of control that came along with the pandemic. Linguistic communication is shown to function as more than just information dissemination. At the same time, the artwork questions the ability of language to adequately and fully represent our experience of the world.
Dissemination: The artwork is presented in the form of a website, available online through the URL provided
NEST
No full textThe output is an artefact comprising an artist’s book. It was developed from a performance, initially presented at SNAParts Gallery as part of INDEX, a fringe festival linked to Yorkshire Sculpture International, alongside Barker’s sculpture and drawings, im(Material) Disarray. Research process: Barker explored the use of allegorical visual narratives to communicate and make meaningful local community experiences. The research consisted of a series of imaginative drawings made in response to observational drawings of swans trying to build a nest out of discarded plastic waste. A verbal narrative was then constructed around the illustrations and initially tested out with a live audience as a spoken performance and then make into an artist’s book. Research insights:
The development and publication of ‘Nest’ allowed Barker to test audience reaction to an allegorical narrative in various formats, from a sculptural installation to a spoken word performance to a fable in the form of an illustrated artist’s book. The integration of text with drawn, spoken word and sculptural presentations of an idea has allowed the allegorical potential of the work to reach a much wider audience than working in any one area. In particular more children have been brought into dialogue with the work, parents are able to engage them with readings after initially experiencing the work as an installation. The opening out of conversations beyond the human has revealed a direction for practice that has unexplored possibilities. The artist is now researching how early animist practices can be integrated into his allegorical narratives. Dissemination: The artefact was published by Workshop Press and disseminated via blog at https://fineartdrawinglca.blogspot.com/2019/09/immaterial-disarray-exhibition.html
Conferencing otherwise: a feminist new materialist writing experiment
No full textThis paper attempts to reconfigure hegemonic framings of ‘the academic conference’ and thereby offer a means to (re-)encounter the spatial, temporal and affective forces that conferences generate, differently. We are a geographically dispersed but multiply entangled group of academic researchers united by theoretical fault lines within our work that seek to ask what if (Haraway, 2016) and what else (Manning, 2016). This ‘what if’ and ‘what else’ thinking has manifested in experimental and subversive doings otherwise at a series of academic conferences. The storying practices presented in this paper were made possible by the vital materialism (Bennett, 2010) of a shared google.doc. It was within this virtual environment that we attempted to weave diffractive accounts of what conferencing otherwise produces. This writing experiment offers a series of speculative provocations and counter- provocations to ask what else does conferencing make possible. This article is an invitation to the reader to plunge in and wallow (Taylor, 2016) within the speculative accounts which ensue and to contemplate the possibilities of breaking free from sedimented ways of neoliberal conferencing
Swapping the pleasures: case study of a social practice artwork encouraging alternative performances of gender within the social dancing of Kizomba
No full textThe teaching of Afro-Latin partner dance forms including Salsa, Bachata, Cha Cha Cha and Kizomba, routinely encourages participants to perform their gender within a rigid paradigm of heteronormative power-relations. Although many dancers are challenging the conventions of male-leading and female-following, through initiatives such as queer-tango and same-sex ballroom dance, there is virtually no evidence of social-dance role-reversal within mixed-sex couples ie. women leading men. This article is a case study of a role-swap Kizomba course run in the city of Leeds in the UK, which aimed to challenge the twin taboos of men-following-women and women-leading-men in Afro-Latin social partner dance. It aimed to discover whether, if provided with the opportunity, social dancers were open to dance-role reversal within a heterosexualised context. The course was conceived as a socially-practice artwork. This study draws data from: questionnaires completed by dancers who attended the classes; ethnographic observation of the process and its outcomes; interviews with members of the larger Kizomba dancing community. The results of the role-swap course confounded the expectations from the literature review, with both female and male participants demonstrating an openness to learning non-traditional roles. This case study advocates the potential for creative interventions within existing communities of practice as a means to challenge conventions of social relations within those contexts
Made to last: Product life extension through emotional durability
No full textWe are in an age of incontrovertible climate change, yet efforts to tackle this crisis have largely focussed on the adoption of renewable energy generation and energy efficiency. This research will instead focus on the vast amounts of embedded carbon emissions within the design of products by tackling the ever-growing problem of eWaste through circular design and emotionally durable design. Consumers are continuously replacing and scrapping electronics that is growing three times faster than any other type of waste in the EU, Greenpeace (2015). In an effort to challenge this paradigm of consumption Chapman (2005) proposed Emotionally Durable Design as a theory and design strategy to encourage people to keep products for longer. The research will be underpinned by Emotionally Durable Design and qualitative mixed methodologies to uncover the reasons why people form attachments with certain products. Forming an attachment with a product is created over time and the longer a product is owned the more likely feelings of sentimentality and nostalgia will form, Page (2014). It is this attachment that can form between a user and their product that can be meaningful enough for the user to delay or prevent product replacement. This attachment research will then inform the design and development of new sustainable products that are designed with the whole product life cycle in mind through the consideration of sustainable materials that improve with age and can work within circular business models for long term sustainability
To make purple, you need blue: Prince as embodiment of the postmodern blues aesthetic
No full textAs part of his ground-breaking work as a stylistic provocateur during the 1980s and 1990s, blues music and blues culture provided a fundamental element of Prince’s composition, production and live performance practice. This chapter constructs a continuum of blues music performance including Muddy Waters, B.B. King and Jimi Hendrix, positioning Prince as a performer in full command of the aesthetic qualities that characterise African-American music-making with specific reference to the stylistic gestures particular to the blues. This chapter does not attempt to delimit and collapse Prince’s activity into a single style or genre of practice, or to disregard his wider contribution to popular music. Neither is this an attempt to claim Prince purely as a bluesman – although the figure of the bluesman is one of great complexity in cultural studies. This is not a reductive polemic. The intention is to deconstruct several key performances and rehabilitate the artist’s practice as part of the ongoing continuum of the blues aesthetic. With this in mind, the chapter discusses definitions of the blues aesthetic, blues music and blues performers. The chapter looks at several musical examples in pursuit of musical and stylistic analysis before the presentation of conclusions. Specifically, the chapter discusses a live performance of ‘If I Had A Harem’ (1988), additionally, recordings of ‘Zannalee’ (1993) and ‘The Truth’ (1996), offers a comparative analysis between Prince’s ‘5 Women’ (1999a) and B.B. King’s ‘The Thrill Is Gone’ (1969); Prince’s ‘The Ride’ (1993), and Jimi Hendrix’s ‘Hear My Train A-Comin’’ (1967a); and finally Prince’s ‘Purple House’ (1999b) is compared to Jimi Hendrix’s ‘Red House’ (1967b). There are additional references to other Prince songs which contain strongly indicative blues material such as ‘The Question of U’ (1990)
Everyday graphic design
No full textThis paper explores a tension between the contemporary Graphic Designer David Carson and the 1960s artist Jacques Villeglé, an artist Carson has never heard of. We claim that Villeglé’s work celebrates the irregularities of what could be considered mundane ad hoc street performances. In contrast, Carson more or less detaches his work from that seamy reality of the banal by reducing the inherent complexity of the everyday into ideal assemblages of image-and-text. By highlighting this awkward difference between an ideal designerly intention and a grubbier everyday reality, we stimulate appetites for more realist-inspired discourses of graphic design
Dancing for good
No full textDevised to coincide with the final month of the run up to the US Presidential Election, the exhibition comprises two pieces. The most noticeable: 2 Inflatable Air-dancers, 2020 , are located on the front lawn of the PS1 house and will be hard to miss. Air-dancers assume the form of the popular promotional tool for retail outlets, comically flapping around to draw the attention of passersby and beckon them towards the products or services that they promote. These Air-dancers are emblazoned with a national call to work together and turn the page on a difficult time. They flap pathetically, yet with hope, outside the gallery, creating a conflicting feeling of political possibility and potential absurdity.
Exercise Your Rights is a two-channel video installation (22min) that will play on loop in the gallery window (accessible outside, during gallery hours, from the front porch of PS1). This work is a tongue-in-cheek exercise video demonstrating a series of exercises dutifully carried out over a Zoom call between the UK and the US, to “evoke a positive experience in electoral democracy.” The project was disseminated at Public Space One Iowa City, US between 2 October and 03 November 2020